


Work Your Way Around

by wanderlustlover



Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [15]
Category: The Expanse (TV)
Genre: F/M, Misses Clause Challenge, Yuletide 2019
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:00:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,234
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21826351
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/wanderlustlover/pseuds/wanderlustlover
Summary: It all started with Julie walking up to the bar, drink still in hand, saying, "You never said you were the other Earther everyone wouldn't shut up about."
Relationships: Julie Mao/Jim Holden
Series: Wanderlustlover's Yuletides [15]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/190838
Comments: 4
Kudos: 15
Collections: Yuletide 2019





	Work Your Way Around

**Author's Note:**

  * For [CypressSunn](https://archiveofourown.org/users/CypressSunn/gifts).



It all started with Julie walking up to the bar, drink still in hand, saying,

"You never said you were the other Earther everyone wouldn't shut up about." 

Actually, it all started a few weeks ago, with Julie opening her eyes, knowing full well that she should be dead when she definitely was not dead, but that's not something she wants to think about when there's a hand pushing into her underwear, and she's sucking on an ear lobe, grazing her teeth a little too hard while half-drunk on too many drinks from that bar, but even more so on just fucking being alive. Which is why when those fingers slide into the slick over her clit, she groans and arches into them, hips thrusting up with involuntary invitation.

Julie's hands are in Holden's hair, and she can't entirely remember how she got here, except that even though he's an infuriating disaster on all news feeds, with those dark, pleading eyes and that idealistic rhetoric, he's also got a wicked smirk and a rough, warm feel to his voice that reminds her just enough, and too much, of home for her to miss it. 

"Your face is everywhere," she's saying, even as he's flipping his hand around, and she's driving her nails into his skin with the inability to hold on hard enough. Commenting on a conversation that has slid in and out since she walked up and said that first line. "I can't even get a drink without turning around and seeing your face all over everything again."

Him, the reckless captain who saw the destruction of Cant, who blackmailed the Martian Navy, and stole a stealth ship, by doing the opposite of what everyone else would and going public with everything, playing in constant rotation on the feeds. Her, the lost rebel daughter, who should be very, very dead, but was, instead, the lone survivor of a catastrophe of thousands perpetrated by her father, who could even be behind why she's somehow survived what happened to her, making her every government's Interest Number One since Venus. 

"No, it's not," Holden says, and she can see that warm, caustic smirk, and the taunt in those puppy dog eyes before she's even pulled back up to look up at him. Which he is. Smirking. Looking at her with those eyes. But he's somehow managing to already start sliding a finger inside her as his thumb is navigating how to find the best way to circle her clit while inside half a jumpsuit he can't see through, while saying, "You'll know when my face has gotten _everywhere_." 

Julie groans in a way that has nothing to do with the second finger he's trying to start working in from the very beginning, "I hate you." 

Even when what she means is that she knows he saved her. Him and the others. Naomi and Amos, and Alex and Joe. Brought her back from the brink. But that he's still a class act Earther wreck. A naive man tilting at an idealistic world, who somehow made the world stand still, and who still somehow has a worse sense of timing, and an even dirtier mouth than anyone would expect of him. 

He's laughing into her hair, and murmuring, "No, you don't," with smug delight, as the same time as he's thrusting into her with both fingers and she can't manage anything but swearing in Belter patois into his neck for the next half of a minute. Grinding down against the rough feel of his hand, trapped in all her clothes, and he still has far too many on.

"Fuck me," she says, fingers knotted in his hair before she's dragging his mouth back against hers and kissing him almost viciously. Like she's starving for it. Like she might be able to breathe straight through his mouth. At least she made a faint hiss of sound with air between her teeth as his hand stopped moving suddenly, dropping the bottom off her stomach with that, too. 

There he went again. Holden ducking his head to catch her eyes before looking around them. "Here? You sure?" 

The bathroom in the bar, all stains no one wants to have analyzed and sludge that Julie's not sure when last saw cleaning, but she doesn't care. She feels more alive right at the edge of this cliff than she has walking around, being asked the same questions by endless diplomats and members of state and medical personal. Julie doesn't know _why_ she's alive, and sometimes she swears, she can still feel **it** , hear **it** , in her dreams and when awake, and she's not sure she entirely is. Alive.

But right now, right here, every bit of her feels like herself, feels madly alive. It makes her smile crookedly, all reddened skin around her lips from the rushed frenzy of their kissing, and she jumps the way she would if she was hitting speed in the Razorback. "Unless it's all too good for you."

Holden gives a laugh under his breath that half-surprised appreciation and half-shocked amazement, and Julie knows precisely why all the girls fall for his shit. Why she doesn't even want to fight it. All those soft edges right next to his hard ones. When he's saying -- "Alright" -- even as his hand is coming up and they're both working on peeling back her already disheveled jumpsuit. 

His pants going next, more shoved down around his calves than off, before he's sweeping her off the ground with those large rough hands. Pinning her up to the wall she'd only been leaning against before now, and her legs are wrapping around his waist, ankles only catching in time before he's pushing into her hard and fast. Her head rolling back against the wall, black hair coming loose all around her shoulders.

This is why they do it, too. Whoever the other people are, all of them. Who fall under James Holden’s spell. Because he’s good at what he does. He’s good at those god damn puppy eyes, and good at that stupid damn idealism that’s going to get them all killed, and he’s so much better than good at the way he’s fucking into her hard and sure, one hand on the wall and the other on her hips, and she thinks it’s not him for any of those reasons either. 

Not when she’s gasping out words like “oh” and “god” and “I’ll kill you if you stop” and there’s patios and swearing shoved into his shoulder, his hair, the cut of his teeth, the side of his face, the open-air above them as she writhes. It’s about the fact that he doesn’t worry at all about how he touches her, about whether she’s the plague that struck Eros or the miracle that might save Everyone Else. 

That he offered her a place on the ship earlier, and she hadn’t wanted to look at it straight, after all the lights and cameras and needles and messages from her father that she played but ignored. After realizing that no one else seems to know how to talk to her, or look at her, or work with her, or see her under all the headlines. Which seems to be something they all have in common. Her, and the crew of the Rocinante.

That maybe she’s working out her way to saying yes with this, too.


End file.
